Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov (2002) The last great master, in the Viscontian sense of European cinema. And one of the great digital artists, endowing digital with a Proustian impact. His films raise issues about preservation (of History, Art) and memory. I could equally well cite his magnificent film The Sun. Black Book by Paul [...]More →

If the films were classified in order of preference, In Vanda’s Room would occupy first place. It’s by chance that Costa’s film tops a chronological ordering: of the ten cited, it is undoubtedly the only one whose importance can be immediately measured against the scale of cinema history. In Vanda’s Room launched a new epoch, [...]More →

The best science-fiction film of the ‘00s is Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008)—the next great science-fiction film of that decade is Silent Light (2007). The interesting thing is that both are set in Mexico. But Silent Light is about aliens in an alien world, and Sleep Dealer is about humans in a post-human world. Rivera, [...]More →

It’s not often that one would write about a film while it’s still in the middle of its first screening. But as it turns out, one of my favourite movies of this decade—a movie that’s also one of my favourites of the ‘90s, ‘80s, and ‘70s—offers no other choice. I’m speaking of Tony Conrad’s Yellow [...]More →

One of the most important filmic events of the decade was Wang Bing’s monumental West of the Tracks, which changed the way we look at documentary, social reality, and Chinese cinema. From December 1999 to the spring of 2001, Wang and his sound engineer Lin Xudong stayed at their own expense in the Ti Xie [...]More →

Every contender for a “best-of” list should be seen more than once. First impressions aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. And if you care about accuracy and fairness, films not commercially distributed should be given as much consideration as widely available ones. As I was unable to view all of my “contenders” multiple [...]More →

Seven hundred words aren’t many to fillet the best from a decade, especially when you’d like to use some of them to discuss how archival DVD releases are helping to demolish the institution of film criticism. Maybe we can get to that topic in a future issue, but for now—best crack on. In September 2004 [...]More →

Hong Sang-soo’s most recent film, Like You Know It All (2009), begins with a filmmaker arriving at a film festival in Korea, where he’s supposed to serve on the jury. Hong’s basic plots are usually triggered by his memories, and so some people call him a Proustian director, while others prefer Rohmerian, due to his [...]More →

A decade of remembering (or, Avant que j’oublie) Literally. Or the fear of forgetting. From Godard’s elegiac Éloge de l’amour (an anguished apologia for the ramshackle installation to come—another of the decade’s most memorable moments strewn amid the ruins of abandoned thought), perhaps the most poignant and prescient statement of the ‘00s (one plus one), not [...]More →

When I think of Role Models (2008), the film I’ve seen more often than any other in the last decade—except maybe Colossal Youth—the word that comes to mind is wise. The best of recent American comedies, i.e., the most particular, have trouble off the continent because of their particularities—you might say a discrete sense of [...]More →

Everything is told, but nothing was ever written. The decade closed like a baffling movie ending: film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc were shot dead during a robbery in the former’s home in Manila. In addition to being one of the few defenders of true independent cinema in the region, Tioseco was also the [...]More →

David Lynch is not an overlooked filmmaker and Mulholland Drive is not a film in need of championing—quite the contrary, since it has already won the decade-end critics’ polls of several other publications. Still, this near-unanimous canonization is not just surprising but suggestive in ways that have largely gone unremarked. It’s worth taking a moment [...]More →

Instead of yet another list of favorites, the Ferroni Brigade offers a dozen extraordinary films that have remained marginalized for different reasons; a little anthology of current film culture’s blind spots and an antidote for people who, like us, are lulled to sleep browsing the Times et al. polls. Notes from the Basement (2000). If [...]More →

Looking back on the first ten years of this century, it’s hard not to consider it one of the most appalling periods in recent memory. Rung in by tragedy and followed by a disgraceful variation on frontier justice (fuelled by pampered frat boy machismo), the decade dragged obnoxiously on with one outrage following another each [...]More →

The value of the game of lists—if there is one—is that it affords one an opportunity to share one’s enthusiasms, to extol, to an imagined other, certain values one holds dear. Each of the films on my list is, by its very existence, a victory against the Cinema of Alienation and Distraction; each, in highly [...]More →

Cloverfield (2008) is the film one must have seen in order to take stock of where we are, today, in 2010, once again faced with the same questions. Realism, André Bazin, and “The Evolution of a Cinema of Exploration,” the special beauty of films destroyed, lost, regained, forever incomplete—Kon-Tiki and the others…the delicate balance between [...]More →

Okay, I have a fascination with lists: best of, worst of, whatever. I would even claim they’re useful as a quick sketch of history, revealing which films are remembered, which are forgotten. In Film Comment’s best-of-decade poll, for example, I was pleased to see that so many films I admired were remembered by others, and [...]More →

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